Architects are being restricted in exercising their profession in East Jerusalem. This is mainly the result of the Israeli-Palestine conflict which has left its mark on the built environment of the city. This study aims to determine how architects have worked within the restrictions present in East Jerusalem. Specifically, it investigates how architects have redefined their profession and went outside of the traditional boundaries in exercising their profession. To answer the question of how architects practise their profession in area of conflict, a research has been conducted into the roles of various Israeli and \ Palestinian architects. The research focussed on both their public standpoints regarding the conflict and their impact on the built environment of East Jerusalem. The result of the research has showed that architects have created new roles for themselves in which their are able to use their architectural traits to influence the design of the city by different means. They use their connection to the conflict as instigators in their fight to, once again, play an important role in shaping the city. Furthermore architects have expressed their architectural ideas through other forms that the traditional physical means. These results suggest that the architectural profession has the potential to influence much more than just the built environment. By exercising their profession in combination with other disciplines the architect is able to create architectural work that goes beyond the building or even the city. Their newly created roles have the ability to redirect the future course of the conflict, by forming public debate and removing restrictions for future architects. Their connections to other disciplines and broad use of expressing their work has turned them from single instances into architectural typologies. They can be seen as a proposition for future architects working within East Jerusalem.

The present paper investigates the architectural meaning and importance of borders in the context of increased European cooperation. The question is investigated through the case study of the trinational border area in the metropolitan region of Basel, where Switzerland, Germany and France meet. The central theme propelling the discussion is the question of how the idea of the border has changed through history in the three countries and how this has affected the architecture of the study area. The research provides an insight into how the abstract ideas of borders and nations are translated into urban form.Over the course of history, the Basel region has seen many different systems of territorial division. The physical lines can be traced back to the roman era, but the widely accepted meaning of the border has varied greatly over the centuries. The border has produced different kinds of architecture depending on the way that it was interpreted by different people in different eras. The early history of the Basel region shows that many different border demarcations could have been the outcome of antiquity and the middle ages. It was only when the border line was widely accepted as a part of everyday life, through the increasing influence of monarchies and later on, the nation states, that the border gained in power as a primary urban element in Basel. This strong position was maintained by historiographical constructions that legitimized the location and importance of the border and made the border generally accepted by the public. This new kind of border initially produced military architecture and pushed away urban centres. When capitalism and industrialization gradually took over from the feudal monarchies, a second type of architecture started to emerge. A dense industrial strip following the border was a consequence of the transition of legal apparatuses that takes place here. Following the world wars, the image of the Rhineland underwent a drastic change in the EU countries, promoting the idea of European unity. In combination with the post war economic prosperity, the deconstruction of the European borders has led to the discovery of vacant land in the middle of the Basel metropolis. The discovery of the possibilities that transnational cooperation gives has laid the foundation for a new ambition: a common international neighbourhood.

Refugee camps are considered temporal places, outside of the normal juridical order, in which people are waiting to restart their lives in a new place or return to their original homes. The Palestinian refugee camps, which have existed for almost 70 years now, challenges these conceptions. The development of the Jabal al-Hussein camp, one of the Palestinian refugee camps in Amman, Jordan, from tent camp to neighbourhood, its governmentality by both the Jordan government and URNWA, and the new social structures combined show in this case study that the camp is a very paradoxical and ambiguous spatial form in terms of temporality, exclusion and stagnation. Or in other words, in its permanence, inclusion and identity. Therefore, we must reconsider the theories on refugee camps and shift our focus from the symbolic-political to the material-lived.